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Today I am void of anxiety and the words are seeming to flow better.  So, I finished the rough draft of my first page.

It was six weeks since the last rain and the garden was holding on by a thread.  The beans were still thriving.  And the tomatoes, the zucchini, the marigolds.  I had continued to water every chance I got despite the water restrictions, despite the potential $400 fine or the neighbors’ dirty looks.   I also continued to turn new earth, rubbing open old blisters and sowing seeds too late for planting.  The garden had become both my obsession and my lifeline.  It had become my only source of peace.

Most days, my husband would walk down the hill to my little plot and try to persuade me to come inside.  “It’s dinner,” he’d say.  “Gabe would probably like it if you could eat with us.”  More often than not, I would wave him away sometimes continuing to hoe, sometimes sinking to the ground, nose against the dirt just breathing.  The house had become something constricting.  An emotional tourniquet, squeezing the very life out of me.

You see, as goal driven, as (meticulous) as I had become outside, I had become equally indolent inside.  Our four small rooms had become filled with piles of laundry, of old magazines and scattered paperbacks, of plates, and spoons, and sippy cups that needed washing.  Many times, I would find myself staring, sometimes for a moment, sometimes for the better part of an hour too overwhelmed, too limp to attack the mess.

The more I stood, the more I stared, the more the laundry, the papers, the dishes began to represent my personal failures.   A few dirty socks might remind me that I wasn’t organized enough or loving enough to be a good mother.  A stack of dishes might indicate that I wasn’t disciplined enough to keep my weight down.  Half-written papers, half-read books would scream to me that I’d never amount to anything, that I would die without any real accomplishments.

Since our son was born, this had been my life.

Even with the solace of the garden, it had become impossible to ignore my depression.  To ignore the fact that making a grocery list had become a Herculean task or that touching my husband made me feel sick and damaged.  I had withdrawn from activities, kept the curtains drawn when I was inside, felt numb when I breastfeed my baby.

Oddly, I also suffered from intense anxieties.   One day I would be curled up on the couch like a salt-sprinkled slug unwilling, unable to talk with anyone.  The next day, I would be so flooded with plans and ideas that I could only pace around the house humming and mumbling to myself.  Amid these plans, these ideas, I also feared that a killer might be watching us.  Or, that I might accidentally drop a knife that would plunge through the heart of our son, killing him.   I would wander through the house void of feeling in my arms or my legs.

It was in that anxious state that I saw the child behind our clothes dryer.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 18th, 2009 at 11:33 am and is filed under Lagniappe, Pure Raw Motherhood, That Beautiful Bipolarity!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.